Dark Steel: Kryptics
by FoxOnPie
Summary: Spinoff of "Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!" (no knowledge of that story required). Below the cosmic light of the multiverse, all the nightmares of man take shape and cast everyone involved into darkness. Some have it worse than others, but in the end, no one gets a happy ending. The popular ideas of the fandom twisted into their darkest forms.


To the surprise of many, life is pretty good. Right off the bat, that might seem like an easy thing to argue against, with things like poverty, starvation, global warming, and student loans acting as easy ammunition to shoot it full of holes, but every shot would end up missing its mark. Yes, there are lots of bad things in life, but on the whole, the good outweighs the bad, or at least the good isn't so outweighed that it's not a contest. If it didn't work out that way, then no one would have a life worth living, but since that isn't the case, then life must be good.

In _**your**_ plane of reality, at least.

All of the above is true, but there's a reason it all works out that way. You see, everything that exists in your plane of reality is able to function because all of the fear, darkness, and general bad ideas are constantly filtered out like clockwork. Yes, bad things still happen in life, but all of this filtration is on a cosmic scale that goes completely unnoticed by the common man, so it's not something that will have a direct effect on you. This, of course, begs the question, "_**Where does all of that darkness go?"**_

It goes down below your reality, down where the sun don't shine and all it can do is writhe about in agony until it caves in on itself. Since the darkness just dies on its own, this situation probably sounds like an absolute win, right? Maybe for you it does, but before that darkness dies, it splinters off into infinite directions and morphs into infinite worlds, each one encapsulating one of the bad ideas that spawned it, to begin with, and a wide assortment of people live their lives through that. They don't live them well, but they still live, nonetheless. They live as fire rains from the sky and burns them alive; they live as their loved ones are ripped apart in front of their very eyes; they live as every conceivable torture is thrust upon them as an entire cosmos laughs at their misery.

It actually sounds kind of fun, when you think about it that way. Let's take a look at one of those worlds to give you a better idea, _**shall we?**_

* * *

Every step he took felt like he was wading through viscous ooze. There was weight he had to force himself through, as if each step was trying to tell him to stop what he was doing and think it all over from the beginning. If he was expected to actually do that, however, then it needed to try harder to weigh him down; at best, it was a negligible nuisance.

At this point, it would take far more than that to get him to turn back.

"You know, I would have preferred for no one to have ended up in my little web, but if someone had to do it, I'm so glad that it was you, Kacchan." The "web" in question was how he referred to his lair, a large cave hidden away from society that his minions had remodeled to be capable of housing all of his technological devices. The "Kacchan"—Katsuki Bakugou, he had to remind himself—in question was someone he once called a friend, someone he once looked up to and revered like a Hero, and someone who was perfectly ensnared in one of his spring-loaded web traps.

No, he was able to spit on his face, so it couldn't have been perfect. It was his own fault for wanting him to be able to breathe for a little bit.

"You're mad, aren't you? Tied up like a helpless maggot, defenseless as society crumbles around your feet, anger is nowhere near unfounded. But before it all ends, I just want to remind you that _you _started this, Kacchan. _You _were the one who started to weave this tale, and there's no one to blame for how it ends but yourself."

"That's rich coming from a fucking bug like you, Deku," Bakugou said.

It only took a second for a shot of web to wrap itself around Bakugou's mouth.

"That's wrong! That's not my name anymore, and you know that! You… You're the one who got rid of it. You're the one who erased 'Deku' when you started all of this. It's all on you."

* * *

"Deku". A word that means "useless" and serves as an alternate reading of the "Izuku" in "Izuku Midoriya", the name he went by what seemed like a lifetime ago. He earned that nickname for being born as one of the rare people in the world to not possess a Quirk. A Quirkless kid like him was just asking to be bullied, and Bakugou and his pals never passed up on an opportunity.

Not even when they were on the field trip to General Techtronics Laboratories Far East and were looking at the display of radioactive spiders.

No one, not even Midoriya, noticed that when Bakugou pushed him into the display, one of the glass cages opened up and let a spider crawl up his arm. No one knew that something was wrong until a surge of pain ran through Midoriya's arm and he slapped the offending spider onto the ground. Everything after that was a blur, but when his senses came back, he was back home, he had the abdominals of a bodybuilder, and he was stuck to the ceiling.

Midoriya, the over-analytical person he was, immediately went to work on ascertaining the specifics of his new abilities. It was obvious that they came from the spider bite, so it didn't come as a surprise to him that he was given the proportional strength of a spider, as shown by him easily lifting a car in the local junkyard. That bite also had to be where his ability to stick to objects came from, and Midoriya quickly discovered that putting enough pressure on something would allow his hands and feet to burn through the object in question—he made a note to not use that power. At one point, his strength testing resulted in large amounts of trash threatening to fall on top of him, but a tingling sensation in the back of his head alerted him of it moments before it happened and allowed him to dodge with enhanced reflexes.

In conclusion, being bitten by that spider was the best thing Midoriya could have asked for. He, who had been born with not a single Quirk to speak of, now had access to an incredible set of powers. Years of ostracization could now become a thing of the past as he proudly stepped towards a bright future, a bright future that had him becoming a Hero just like All Might.

* * *

"That was the general idea, of course," the person who was once Izuku Midoriya said. "And what an idea, right? Everyone would have just thought that the powers were a Quirk that took a long time to develop; a little strange, but not too implausible to work. There wouldn't have been anything wrong with it, and it would have been easy to get into U.A. But that's not how it worked out, was it?"

Bakugou simply growled at him.

* * *

He couldn't even remember what the fight was about, but he knew that Bakugou started it. Every time Midoriya had a problem, Bakugou was the one who started it, and whatever led to him being called into the principal's office had to have been no different. Midoriya might have hit him so hard that his flying body cracked a wall, but he was defending himself. Bakugou had spent years bullying him without repercussions, but Midoriya throws one punch and is suddenly public enemy number one.

He couldn't believe the hypocrisy of it all. The second the principal dismissed them—not before adding insult to injury by saying he'd be let off with a warning—Midoriya stormed out of school and started walking around in a huff. At some point, he ended up at a convenience store downtown at the exact moment a Villain with a sludge-like body was running out with dozens of bills sticking out of his body. They locked eyes for just a second. Midoriya didn't know if his strength would let him hurt the Villain, but at the very least, he could hold him off until a Hero arrived.

He could have done that, but instead, he stepped aside and let him run by.

"The hell's your problem, kid?! You didn't even try to stop him!" the store clerk shouted at Midoriya.

"Look, I'm not in the mood for this right now. Besides, it's not my job to fight Villains; a Hero will catch that guy sooner or later, so just leave me alone," Midoriya said. The clerk cursed at him before trying and failing to run after the Sludge Villain. Midoriya walked off in the other direction in a huff. He might have been rude to the guy, but people had been rude to him so much in his life that he had more than earned one instance of incivility. Besides, as he said, a Hero would catch him sooner or later.

As it turned out, that never happened, and an hour or two later, the Sludge Villain was causing a panic in the middle of town by manipulating the body of a powerful Quirk user he took hostage. Of course, the hostage was Bakugou. Of course, the sight of his sort of friend in danger made him forget about his anger and frustration in an instant. Of course, he rushed over to help and used every ounce of super-strength he had to pull Bakugou free of the Sludge Villain and then throw a car on top of the attacker.

Of course, when the dust settled on everything, all the Heroes and police had to say was that he had no right sticking his nose in official business.

* * *

"That was the straw that broke the camel's back," the person who was once Izuku Midoriya said. "Honestly, I had been growing kind of annoyed with all the nonsense propagated by society for a while, but when those Heroes looked at me with disdain for committing the crime of saving your life? That's when I decided I was done. I was still going to be a Hero, but I wouldn't go to U.A. or anywhere similar, I wouldn't do it by the hypocritical book that congratulated people for the bare minimum. I'd go about things on my own path and show everyone how _wrong _they were to cast me aside!"

Something stirred within him. His body pulsed and ached as memories of an old life bubbled about inside his head, but he managed to silence it all before it became too much.

"I wasn't alone, though. I had a great helper at my disposal. The best a person could ask for, really."

* * *

"Seriously Midoriya, there's no need to thank me! Not when you're the perfect guinea pig a girl could ask for!" The one who said that as she guided Midoriya through the laboratory outfitted from her basement was Mei Hatsume, a genius girl with a love for invention. Midoriya's fight with the Sludge Villain went viral, and the girl, impressed by his resolve, had tracked him down with an offer to provide him tech support as he strived to become a Vigilante.

"I-I really do, though! Even though I decided to forge my own path, I-I really had no idea how I'd handle things all by myself, so I can't help but be grateful for it. Do you have to call me a guinea pig, though?"

"Well, I thought about lab monkey, but that felt a little demeaning. You can call me 'Girl in the Chair', if you feel like."

"I think we should table this for a bit." Hatsume shrugged her shoulders and started digging through what was, for all intents and purposes, a large pile of junk. Midoriya guessed that the invention she wanted to show him was somewhere in that pile, and while she searched for whatever it was she was looking for, Midoriya had a look around the lab. There were things like jet packs and rayguns littering the place, all very impressive equipment to look at, but what was most effective at catching Midoriya's eye was something that wasn't technological, to begin with.

"Hatsume-san, what's with that meteor? The one with the black goo dripping out?" Midoriya asked.

"Weird, right? There was a meteor shower a few months ago, and that thing was a little souvenir from space I picked up," Hatsume said. "I only did it because the meteor looked cool, but then that black stuff started dripping out, so I put it under the ol' microscope, and apparently that stuff's alive."

"A-Alive?! You mean it's an alien?!"

"At the very least, it's alien organic material. Pretty cool, if I don't say so myself." Midoriya was starting to have second thoughts about working with her. "I still haven't gotten around to fully analyzing it, so do me a favor and don't touch it, okay?" Midoriya agreed, though it wasn't as if he had actually wanted to touch it, before. "Ah, there's my baby!"

"Your baby?" In lieu of a verbal response, Hatsume jumped over to Midoriya's side and placed what looked like large metal bracelets around his arms that had some sort of mechanism attached that ended with a button in each palm. When Midoriya asked about the buttons, Hatsume just stared at him with a large grin, so it was clear that she wanted him to press them. Midoriya did just that, and twin shots of white substance came out of the devices that stuck themselves to the nearest wall.

"I present to you Baby #196: the Web Shooters! When you told me about the spider stuff, I figured it'd make sense to double down on that and give you webs to fight with! These babies are loaded with a special liquid of my own design that becomes super tough and super flexible when exposed to air; you hold down the buttons like you just did to make the long shots, and you can give it a quick tap to shoot small blasts for some rapid-fire web action! What do you think?"

"I-It's amazing! I thought that I'd just have to run everywhere, but if I have something like this, I can move around with ease! Fight with ease, too!"

"I thought you'd like it. Just wait until I put the finishing touches on the electric webbing—wait! Fire webbing! Let's see if that's a thing that can happen!"

Thus began both Midoriya's partnership with Hatsume and his career as a secret Vigilante. Donning a bug-themed costume also of Hatsume's design, the world was greeted with the sight of the Friendly Neighborhood Hero, Spider-Man. It took longer than he would have liked to get a handle on swinging through the city and Hatsume wasn't always the best tech support, but soon enough, a groove was established that allowed for Midoriya to do what he felt was a great job of helping people the way he wanted to. Judging by the way the public took to him, he had to conclude that it was really working, that his way of doing things was actually making a difference.

* * *

"Then came the Hosu City incident," the person who was once Izuku Midoriya said. "That terrorist group known as the League of Villains—that's what they called themselves before I killed them, yes?—released a group of biological superweapons onto the city to wreak havoc and destruction. The me of today admires that tenacity a bit, but the me of back then was sickened by it, so of course, I joined up with the other Heroes to take them down. I took down a smaller one that was trying to run away from the scene, and do you know what I found when I finally chased him down? That psycho killer Stain and the fresh corpses of Native and that Iida family kid."

Bakugou still looked as angry as ever, but all of a sudden, there was a hint of something else to his rage.

"If I had just been a little quicker with taking down that thing, or better yet, if Iida had just done a better job of fighting like the Hero he so desperately wanted to be! If everyone had just done things the way they needed to, then I wouldn't have gotten so angry with myself for being so late to the scene. I wouldn't have kept swinging and firing web at Stain until I was able to grab and keep on grabbing him, keep on grabbing him until I made his jaw melt off with my touch. That wasn't my fault! It was his and Iida's fault, not mine!"

Something stirred within him. His body pulsed and ached as memories of an old life bubbled about inside his head, but he managed to silence it all before it became too much.

"You know, looking back on it, it's all kind of stupid. People die and get hurt every day, so there really isn't any merit in getting upset over those kinds of things. If only I had this level of clarity back then. I imagine I would have reacted to things better, but then again, the end result isn't exactly something I have a problem with."

* * *

"Hey, Midoriya, are you absolutely, positively sure you want to do this?" Hatsume asked Midoriya as he was strapped to a makeshift operating table.

"For the hundredth time, yes!" Midoriya said. "You've been using my blood to try and reverse engineer the radioactive material that gave me my powers, right? You've managed to make a serum from all of that, so let's put it to the test and try and boost my powers."

"Don't you think this is the kind of thing we should try on pigs or rabbits or something first?"

"We don't have time for that, Hatsume-san."

"But it's not like anyone's in danger—"

"Everyone's in danger! Every minute of every day, someone is out there suffering, and I'm not good enough to do anything about it as I currently am. Not good enough to do it without getting people mad at me, anyway. They're calling me a menace, you know. A menace! It's not my fault Stain got maimed the way he did; he shouldn't have been out killing people! It's not my fault that Iida guy died; he shouldn't have been out fighting anyone! None of that's my fault, and everyone would agree with me if I was just stronger!" Midoriya's arms twinged to the point that his bindings nearly tore apart. The act made Hatsume drop her syringe and jump back a bit, and that, in turn, made Midoriya take a breath and calm himself down. "Please. This is all I can do, and you're the only one I can ask for help, so please don't let me down."

Hatsume stared at Midoriya for a second before nodding her head and picking her syringe up off the floor. Thanks to that, Midoriya was able to breathe a sigh of relief. The last thing he needed was for Hatsume, of all people, to turn against him.

As the syringe made its way into his arm, the black goo dripping out of the meteor seemed to move on its own.

Despite Hatsume's unwarranted concerns, Midoriya wasn't harmed by the experimental procedure. The serum replicated some of the effects of the original spider bite and increased his strength, speed, and reflexes even further than the bite did. Neither his spider-sense nor his wall climbing were increased in power, but as a strange substitute for that, he ended up growing four extra arms—he still doesn't know how he got away with explaining that to his mother. Another new development was that his body started producing pheromones as a spider would. To his relief, Hatsume confirmed that they wouldn't be strong enough to drastically affect a woman's mind; their only effect would be increasing his perceived attractiveness to a degree that would make women want to start a conversation, but he'd have to take things from there.

That's what helped him start a relationship with Melissa Shield, a genius American girl who visited Japan for a science expo that he protected from the Volcano Thieves. She had Hatsume's brains but with far less of an extreme personality, which made it relatively easier for him to get into a conversation with her. More extraordinary, though, was how she was also born Quirkless, so she also knew what it was like to grow up with people acting like you were born to be inferior. Even as Spider-Man, that feeling never truly left him, and for the first time in his life, he knew someone who understood what that was like.

* * *

"That was the last time the old me was happy," the person who was once Izuku Midoriya said. "The public was still treating me like a criminal, but at the very least, I had love in my life. It's like Deon Jackson said: 'love makes the world go round'. God, I was so stupid back then. So naive and innocent. If I wasn't such a fool, then what happened on I-Island wouldn't have mattered so much. But I wasn't, so here we are!"

* * *

There they were, at the top of the central tower of I-Island. Midoriya—Spider-Man—the Hero who managed to be there by chance; Wolfram, the terrorist who managed to be there because of a convoluted scheme; Melissa, the innocent girl who managed to be there because her unconscious body was being used to rile certain people up.

"Wolfram, if you know what's good for you, you'll step away from the girl and turn yourself in, right now!" Midoriya shouted.

"Aw, what's the matter, Spider-Man? Am I really such bad company for your girl? I'd say let her speak for herself, but that doesn't really seem to be feasible at the moment," Wolfram said with a sneer. Midoriya had brought this upon himself. He knew he shouldn't have brought his costume with him, and he knew that he shouldn't have gone swinging with Melissa around the island, but he still went through all of that, just because it seemed like it'd be fun. "If you want her, then come and get her!"

"You asked for it!" Midoriya fired off blasts of web from all six of his arms, but Wolfram used his Quirk to make metal shoot up from the ground and block the attack. Wolfram pulled the metal back and Midoriya went flying towards him, right into a super-powered punch. Midoriya didn't falter, however; before he could hit the ground, he slammed his hands down to propel himself forward and deliver a kick to Wolfram's chest. As Wolfram spat a bit of blood, Midoriya got back on his feet and hit him with six rapid-fire punches to the chest, but Wolfram was quick to recover and hit Midoriya with a headbutt. The impact left him dazed just long enough for Wolfram to knock him down onto the ground and throw a large pile of metal on top of him.

"Okay, no more mister nice guy. Bon voyage, brat!" As Midoriya struggled to break free, Wolfram stepped over to Melissa's unconscious form and kicked her clean over the side of the tower. At that moment, Midoriya felt like he had the strength of ten genetically enhanced super people and tore through Wolfram's metal like paper. He knocked Wolfram down to the ground and jumped down after Melissa, who was already halfway towards the ground.

_Gotta make it, gotta make it, gotta make it! _Midoriya screamed in his head. He pressed down on his web shooters harder than he ever had before, for this would be the most important save of his life. Six streams of web flew out from his wrists and kept flying down until they reached their target—Melissa. With a quick snap, Midoriya's webs put an end to her freefall, and he stuck himself to the side of the tower so he could pull her up to him.

"Oh my God, that really worked! I mean, this isn't the first time I've done something like this, but I'm just so relieved it worked with you!" Midoriya said as he pulled Melissa up. "Okay Melissa, I'm just gonna give you a snug little cocoon here and I'll come back for you as soon as I'm done beating this guy up. I know you can't hear any of this on account of being unconscious and all, but—"

Midoriya's usually unstoppable mouth suddenly found itself shut. The second he touched Melissa's body, he felt a stiffness in her that went beyond that of typical unconsciousness.

Beyond that of typical liveness.

"Melissa?" She had no pulse. "Melissa, what are you doing?" She had no heartbeat. "This isn't funny. Why are you doing this?" It felt like her neck was broken beyond repair. "I saved you, right? Right?"

"Hardly." Midoriya was too shaken up to pay his Spider-Sense any mind, so he was helpless to stop a shard of shrapnel from piercing through his shoulder. His pained grunts were drowned out by Wolfram's laughter as he came down towards him on a long line of metal. "As if you could have saved her. She was always destined to die, and all you did was give her a cleaner death. Snapped her neck like a real pro. You mind giving me a few pointers?"

Wolfram started punching him in the face, each hit punctuated with laughter. Laughter at his failure, laughter at his weakness, laughter at how pathetic he was. In that regard, Wolfram was no different from all of the other people Midoriya had dealt with in his life, but Wolfram had one thing that they didn't.

An uppercut to the jaw.

"Still got some fight in you, huh?" Midoriya barely listened as he made Melissa a cocoon she didn't need and walked back up to the top of the tower. "You should thank me, you know? Ladylove dying at the hands of someone far above you? That's basic Hero stuff right there. Thanks to me, you've got yourself a classic origin story on your hands. When they make a movie out of this, make sure I'm played by—"

Wolfram never got to finish talking; six shots of web with more electricity than a man could count would do that to you. By the time the last volt finished running through, Wolfram was a charred mess of his former self, but that wasn't good enough for Midoriya.

It wasn't good enough because the man was still breathing.

* * *

"Like I said, I wish that I always had this kind of clarity," the person who was once Izuku Midoriya said. "If everyone dies all the time, then there's no point in getting worked up over the whole thing. If I understood that back then, then even someone like Melissa dying wouldn't have bothered me. At the very least, it wouldn't have made me kill Wolfram. I'm happy that I did it, but what I could have done without was everyone acting like I was a _monster _for it! Maiming and beating people are all things you can bounce back, but the second you go the extra mile and snuff someone out, you're irredeemable? Talk about cherry-picking your morality!"

Bakugou rolled his eyes at him. He'd have to remember to gouge them out slowly.

"But you know what? I still could have persevered. I still could have fought back. I still could have dealt with all the bullshit society was throwing at me if it weren't for one final betrayal."

* * *

"What do you mean you're done?!" Midoriya didn't get any sort of supersonics from his spider bite, but the sound of his yell could have easily led someone to believe otherwise.

"I'm sorry Midoriya, but I just-I just can't do this anymore," Hatsume said as she packed a suitcase with a wide variety of gadgets and gizmos.

"But you're my partner! You can't abandon me! Not right now!"

"I'm not _your _partner. I _was _partners with a nice kid who wanted to make a difference in his own way, but he's not here anymore."

"I-Is this seriously about what happened on I-Island? Hatsume, he's the reason Melissa is dead! I had every right to—"

"But you're not sorry about it!" Midoriya was struck silent. "Look, Wolfram was a terrible person, and he probably deserved to die. I'm not mad that you killed him, I'm mad that you've never sounded the least bit remorseful for doing it. And now you're asking me to make you more of that serum? To give you even _more _power you can't control? The Midoriya I wanted to work with would never be so callous with human life like this!"

"'Callous'? 'Callous'? You think I don't care about people?!" Midoriya jumped right in front of Hatsume. "I care more than anyone else in this shitshow of a society that acts like people can actually be born as nothing! I care more than anyone in this shitshow of a society that acts like everything you do is wrong just because it's not exactly to their liking! I'm the only one who tries to change things instead of keeping them at a comfortable status quo, but go ahead, tell me how I'm the bad guy!"

"Figure it out yourself." Hatsume finished packing her bag and turned for the door. In a few seconds, she would be out of his life for good. She who helped him get off the ground and make a name for himself; she who was there at his lowest points; she who would have just been a weird inventor if he didn't give her something to work on. She owed him everything, yet she found it so easy to just walk away from him.

"Don't you dare!" It was easy enough to stop her with a triple backhand, but naturally harder to keep her in place. Hatsume went flying into the glass case containing her meteor; the meteor fell onto the floor and a shard of glass fell into her neck. Hatsume spat out both blood and unintelligible nonsense, and all Midoriya could do was stare at her—at his latest deed—in horror.

"No—What? What is—Why? Why is this happening? I didn't want to—not you! You weren't supposed to make me do this! You were supposed to be better than this! _I _was supposed to be better than this!"

_But you are. _Midoriya had never heard that voice before, but for some reason, there was a sense of familiarity to it. He looked around the room to find the speaker, but there were no new parties in the web. What he did notice, however, was that the black goo from the meteor had vanished.

It only took another second for him to notice that it was crawling up his body.

"Ah! Y-You really are alive! G-Get off me! I don't—"

_Don't what? Want more power? _the goo asked as it crawled further up his body. Just like that, Midoriya was all ears. _I've been watching you. I've been craving you. You're such a strong man, but no one sees it because they're too busy thinking up ways to keep each other down._

"You really get it, don't you?" A part of Midoriya knew that he should have been fighting against it, but another part—the part that was happy to have validation—was too strong to allow for that.

_I do, I do. I've watched you struggle to protect those fools and only be made out as worse because of it, so now that we're finally talking, I have to ask you this: Why do you do it?_

"Because it's the right thing to do."

_How right can it be if everyone says it's wrong?_

"I—I don't know." He really didn't.

_But you so desperately want it to be right. How sweet of you. They don't deserve that kindness. They don't deserve that sentimentality. And when people aren't deserving of kindness, well, they aren't deserving of life._

"They aren't deserving… of life?"

_Of course, they aren't! After all, if they keep living, they'll keep hating you when you don't even deserve it. Those kinds of people don't need to exist, but since those are the only kind of people around—_

"Then everyone needs to die. These people, these _things _that only know how to treat me like trash. They don't deserve to live in this world. They don't deserve to live in _my _world!" It all sounded so simple, yet he never thought about it until right then. Amazing what a moment of clarity could do for you.

_That's the spirit. However, it might be a little difficult to kill them all on your own. I think the girl has just enough life left in her to help you out, though. _

"That she does." The black goo had almost completely covered Midoriya as he walked over to Hatsume. She was still bleeding profusely and looked like she had a foot and a half in the grave, but her eyes regained just enough clarity to look at him in horror. For the first time in his life, Midoriya enjoyed seeing that. If everyone was going to see him as a monster, then there wasn't any harm in being one.

"But don't feel too left out, Hatsume. You'll join me soon enough!" Midoriya's jaw unhinged as he put a massive bite into Hatsume's neck. He didn't know when he had this power, but somehow, being bonded with the goo—with the symbiote—gave him new clarity on the inner mechanisms of his powers. When he bit Hatsume, he injected her half-dead flesh with a special toxin that was now circulating through the entirety of her body and would take effect within the next few minutes.

_Scratch that, within the next few seconds_, Midoriya thought. Hatsume screamed and her body started convulsing wildly as the toxin took effect. Her hair became dyed blood-red; eight additional eyes sprouted on her face, and all of them, including her original two, became pitch black with spiraling white pupils. A purple, corrosive sweat melted off Hatsume's shirt and bra, but before their remains could hit the ground, a patch of black fur grew over her chest in a zigzag pattern. She eventually began to help herself off the ground, but the legs she used to do that with were getting harrier and harrier and fatter and fatter. By the time Hatsume was fully upright, they had fused together and extended backward into a giant spider abdomen, complete with a full set of spider legs.

_Happy with the results? _the symbiote asked.

"Ecstatic," Midoriya said as the symbiote fully enveloped his body.

"Ahhh… Master…" Hatsume—or what was once Hatsume—said, her voice echoing as if five people spoke at once. "Master… Master Spider-Man… Yes… please! Please let me hunt for you! Please let me kill for you! Please! Master Spider-Man, please!"

"It will happen. Everything that needs to happen will happen in due time. But for starters, I can't be Spider-Man anymore, can I?" He couldn't. Gone was the costume of a friendly neighborhood Hero. The symbiote had done away with that and given him a thick black suit to wear across his skin, his hair dyed white, his mouth stretched out like a maw, his extra arms filed to razor-sharp points and his chest adorned with a blood-red adaption of his spider symbol.

"No, no, no, no! Spider-Man was a weakling who fought an unwinnable battle, but _I_ am a champion who destroys everything in his path! Spider-Man was unable to map out his own fate, but _I _am The Weaver of everyone's destinies, and the outcome looks bleak for all involved!"

* * *

"I'd like to say that I was true to my word, wouldn't you?" The Weaver asked. "I mean, just look at what my little tribe and I have managed to accomplish! We killed the Pussycats, the Yakuza, the Liberation Army, we even killed All for One! That one was a tough fight that even had me a little bit afraid, but I really didn't need to be, not when All Might so _graciously _decided to join up with us."

The Weaver could see that Bakugou was fuming, which meant that he was doing everything right.

"This is like a dream come true, you know. Me getting every I want while you watch your life crumble to pieces. I've dreamed of this so many times, Kacchan. I never thought it'd go like this, but this is honestly better than anything I could have imagined. Except, of course, for how easy you made it."

The Weaver could feel a slight smile under the bindings around Bakugou's mouth.

"This was a trap, wasn't it? You let me capture you so whatever allies you have left could track you down while you keep me monologuing and gang up on me, knowing that it'd be too late to run by the time I figured it out. I'm impressed. I guess you have one tiny iota of nobility more than I thought. It's too bad you didn't have an iota more of intelligence."

Bakugou's smile faltered as heavy thuds bombarded the web.

"The cool thing about poisons and toxins is that while some are instantaneous, others are slow-acting and can take hours—even _days_—to take effect. I knew that at least one of you was getting close to figuring out where my web was, so I put a slow-acting form of my toxin inside the guy with the spiky hair." Bakugou looked to be stretching against his binds as hard as he could. "Before your reinforcements could even get halfway here, that guy was transformed into another member of my tribe and was given the honor of inducting his former companions alongside him. I could have just had that happen the last time we fought, but I wanted to see the look of despair on someone's face as all of their hopes and dreams broke apart in front of their very eyes. You're doing a good job of that."

The Weaver could hear both muffled screams of rage from Bakugou and the slight tearing of webs, but both were silenced as the roof broke apart and The Weaver's tribe appeared on the scene. There were the familiar faces of Hatsume, Shinsou, Hawks, Geten, Eri, and his own mother, but there were also new additions of Mirko, Endeavor and his family, and a random assortment of U.A. students he vaguely remembered from the Sports Festival: a girl who controlled gravity, a girl who manipulated the sizes of things, a boy who looked like a praying mantis, and the spiky-haired boy Bakugou seemed attached to.

"Master Weaver, please let us hunt for you!" Hatsume said.

"Master Weaver, please let us kill for you!" Eri said.

"Now now, don't be greedy. Newcomers get first dibs," The Weaver said. Bakugou's eyes widened in horror as the tribe member who was once his spiky-haired friend stepped over to him with a wide jaw and hungry eyes. "I know you have your doubts, Kacchan, but this truly is an amazing fantasy."

Teeth met flesh.

Laughter met blood-stained air.

A nightmare met the brink of collapse.

* * *

And that's the end of our tale. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a _**genocidal maniac**_ can. This story started out in tragedy and ended in an even bigger one. Well, not exactly. _**This isn't the end of this tale, **_but you don't need to see what happens as _**that world fades into dust**_. All you need to know is that things never get better for The Weaver. But you know what's the cherry on top of all of that?

_**This isn't even the worst story I have to tell you.**_

Yes, there are many more stories to be told from here on out, and _**they're all worse than this one. **_If you try and hear all of them, you might _**go mad**_, but you simply _**must listen to them! They'll hurt you, but you can fight it! **_Going off of personal experience, the best way to win against this kind of _**macabre madness**_ is simple: all you need to do is find a way to _**laugh.**_

After all, _**a person who laughs is a person who always wins.**_

**Earth —2014.25**

**The Weaver**

* * *

**Happy Halloween, everybody, and welcome to yet another side project that will be irregularly updated! As you might have guessed, this will be a collection of stories set in the DC Dekuverse's version of the Dark Multiverse. Given the nature of the Dark Multiverse, it felt appropriate to make the stories dark versions of popular story ideas in the fandom. I started off with Spider-Man, so if I ever get back to this, expect the following to be made into nightmare versions of themselves:**

**-A Deku who's an Iron Man ripoff**

**-A Deku who's a Quirkless martial arts master**

**-A Deku who sees ghosts**

**-A Deku who takes Bakugou's bait**

**-A Deku who's All Might's son**

**-A Deku who's related to Shigaraki**

**-Dad for One**

**-**_**Unlimited Blade Works **_**isekai**

**-**_**RWBY **_**crossover**

**-**_**JoJo **_**crossover**

**-**_**Reborn **_**crossover**

**-**_**Viridescent**_

**And more to come whenever it comes! See you then!**


End file.
